On 2/26/07, Titoxd@Wikimedia titoxd.wikimedia@gmail.com wrote:
From my experience, for every ten Special:Contributions requests made, eight or nine are just to find out the raw edit count, and the rest are used to find namespace distributions, edit summary and minor edit usage. So, displaying user_editcount on Special:Contributions will cause scrape requests to take a substantial hit...
Doesn't any kind of edit count, with or without detailed statistics, require exactly one request per page of contributions? You can't know how many edits the person has without figuring out how many pages there are, but that requires going through every page, which hopefully you've used to scrape all of the contributions into some kind of internal data structure, from which you can then divine whatever statistics you want, no? Is it that statistics only care about the last 1000 edits or whatever, so there's a limit on how many page requests they'll need if not for wanting the full edit count?